All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXXIII

[Bob Schroeck]

New thread is new.

Old thread is here.

[GethN7]

Two things, we have a LARGE backlog I've been working on, and we still need to keep working on it.

On that note, I'd like to recommend StarSword for autopatrolled. Good edits, scrupulously ports only their own work, very helpful and cooperative. I can't see any reason not to.

[robkelk]

Two things, we have a LARGE backlog I've been working on, and we still need to keep working on it.

On that note, I'd like to recommend StarSword for autopatrolled. Good edits, scrupulously ports only their own work, very helpful and cooperative. I can't see any reason not to.

Agreed - they're making good-quality edits without making any missteps that I've noticed.

Speaking of missteps, I think Asch of Apokolips has finally stopped making any, so I'll re-propose they get automoderated as well.

[robkelk]

I think we already have this as a trope, but I can't find it... The regular characters are about to meet a legend in their profession, and the serious character tells the fun-loving character "don't embarrass me in front of him"... then goes on to be so starstruck that he embarrasses himself instead. (Asking because it happens in Thunderbirds Are Go (series)/S3/E09 "Flame Out".)

[GethN7]

In the last thread, there was someone who wanted potential libelous content removed. The content in question is on the Troubled Production/Fan Works page. While I'm not sure it meets the legal definition of libel, it reads a lot like airing a lot of dirty laundry that I heavily doubt is in our best interest to keep or serves our wiki's purpose in any meaningful way.

I proposed to the concerned party that we could simply delete the page (it was the only entry) and then hide the revisions on the source page that reference the contentious content. This is easily done by deleting the page and then undeleting only the latest edit. This would not harm our required content and would fulfill the aims of removing the content, and if it is libelous, would fulfill the purpose of not showing it publicly.

I made no promises to our petitioner except to give the above proposed solution a favorable endorsement; any actions must be done via collegial consensus, and I will abide by the decision of the majority of my fellow administrators.


Below is a copy of our relevant email exchanges:

Geth N7
8:14 PM (6 minutes ago)
to videokillah@aim.com

I will convey this to my fellow administrators and get back to you when there is a response. All I can promise in the meantime is that I will give the proposed plan of action a favorable endorsement.

On Tue, Jun 30, 2026 at 7:17 PM videokillah@aim.com <videokillah@aim.com> wrote:
It would help, yes.

Sent from AOL on Android

On Tue, Jun 30, 2026 at 21:11, Geth N7
<infiltrator7n@gmail.com> wrote:
Certainly. As it stands, I would be willing to endorse to my fellow administrators we simply just delete the page for now, and, to the extent possible, hide revisions on the page it was split off from to prevent older revisions with the content showing up in searches. I believe that would resolve the issue on your end, insofar as we are concerned.

Again, I must stress if we do this, we cannot control if it is mirrored offsite. You would have to deal with that with whoever did so. But as far as we are concerned, I believe the above solution would be fairest to the both of us. Let me know what you think and we'll go from there.

On Tue, Jun 30, 2026 at 5:56 PM videokillah@aim.com <videokillah@aim.com> wrote:
I apologize for being quiet for a few weeks, I had real life business to attend to and expected a response since robkelk passed the buck onto you.

Can we discuss this, Geth?

[MilkmanConspiracy]

For the troubled productions page, I think part of the problem with it probably would need a rewrite to be not a wall of text that jumps around in regards to dates and has a huge quote included. I am in favor of removing it on those grounds alone.

I am in favor of autopatrolling users like StarSword after reviewing their edits.

[Bob Schroeck]

Have we confirmed that videokillah is who he says he is?

I'm okay with promoting both StarSword and Asch.

Rob, that sounds like a variation on or supertrope to Ignore the Disability.

Geth, I'll see what I can do to help with the moderation backlog.

[GethN7]

Have we confirmed that videokillah is who he says he is?

I'm okay with promoting both StarSword and Asch.

Rob, that sounds like a variation on or supertrope to Ignore the Disability.

Geth, I'll see what I can do to help with the moderation backlog.

Beyond what they provided, not really. That said, I'm just inclined to remove it anyway because it reads like a bunch of drama, and as MilkmanConspiracy pointed out, the formatting is atrocious to begin with. If you want me to ask for information from videokillah, I will, but I believe we have enough compelling reasons to just yeet this content anyway.

[Bob Schroeck]

<shrug> If you feel confident enough, go for it. I have no particular reason to keep it. I do have to wonder who the other guy -- PotatoZe -- wanting to delete the page is. If it's a sock for videokillah, I'd personally keep the page around out of spite, because he's using multiple accounts to counterfeit some kind of movement in his favor.

[GethN7]

<shrug> If you feel confident enough, go for it.  I have no particular reason to keep it.  I do have to wonder who the other guy -- PotatoZe -- wanting to delete the page is.  If it's a sock for videokillah, I'd personally keep the page around out of spite, because he's using multiple accounts to counterfeit some kind of movement in his favor.

No, they created that account on ATT, videokillah is their email account, they have confirmed the link in our emails:

Understood. So let's prove my identity then.

I'll start with the obvious. My account name is 'PotatoZe', which I created a day ago.

I'll do the needful, which will be as follows. Delete the Troubled Production/Fan Works/Real Life. It can be recreated if need be; deleting is needed here since this contentious edit is the only thing on the page.

The page itself was split off from Troubled Production; I will have to delete that page and then undelete the edits from after the split-off. This will not harm existing content, and all we need is the latest edit to any page for CC-BY-SA attribution.

To my fellow admins: Have a message I plan to send back to close this matter out, please check your PMs and respond ASAP.

[Labster]

Your plan seems fine, Geth.  Most people like this go away when they get what they want, anyway.

In my own news, I'm planning to replace all of the {{work}}/{{trope}}/etc. templates soon with something that is largely the same is current.  The new one is on display at {{work test}}. I have a few reasons to do this:

• I'd like every template on the same module, for once.  Updates to the modules didn't take effect because people edited the wrong one.
  
• I rewrote it to look less like spaghetti code, and more like something that someone else could maintain.
  
• The net performance is something like the module takes 5 ms longer to run, but we spend 10 ms less in PHP parsing, so it's a tiny perf gain
  
• Configuration of which subpages go in which order is moved to another module, which other people should be able to edit without screwing things up.
  
• By replacing {{TOPLEVELPAGE}} with mw.title.rootPageTitle it squashes the italics bug -- comparing string lengths when one of the strings used escaped characters meant counts didn't match (thankfully not a unicode normalization bug, but similar idea)
  
• Removing Variables extension from our code.  We didn't use it much, and its future remains in doubt from the near-term rollout of Parsoid.  (Also: Parsoid is second system syndrome for the wiki parser.  I expect in 5 years it will be just as bad as the old parser, only differently bad.)
  

You can test it by previewing {{work test}} where {{work}} is currently.  Let me know if you see any issues before I deploy.

Later on, I think I wan to finally implement my plan to cancel Sparta for being anti-woke remove Laconic sub pages by putting the content into the main text.  If you look at Dacha, you can see what happens with the {{SHORTDESC}} magic word, which makes the description show up there.  And not just there!  You can see it in search (on newest Vector), as well as in ?action=info.  Ideally I'd like to do three things with this: display the short description on category pages to improve discoverability, figure out a way to hack vector2022 search bar into vector classic, and bot the text of Laconic pages into Main, so I can delete them.

I'm not sure if we need to change how the text is displayed.  (All of that whitespace on Dacha -- that in the usefulnotes template I'm gonna fix soon).  Second, it doesn't seem to apply wikilinks (see Aerith and Bob).  Not sure how important that is -- we definitely will have laconics in the form of X meets Y.  We could always replace it with something more like Bucket which could do the links, but probably not everything else.